You may have seen my guest post on Healthcare IT Today about Why Public Health Data needs to Modernize a few months back. I've been working to support this for years, and in October 2025, HL7 achieved a pretty significant goal supporting that. The HL7 Version 2 to FHIR Standard for Trial Use was finally published.
I have been working on the HL7 Version 2 to FHIR project since the initial inception in late 2018, almost at the same time as I started at Audacious Inquiry. My first project at Audacious was to create a V2 to FHIR Converter, which we did build and provide to some of our customers. Audacious contributed the mappings our team developed (mostly through efforts of our product owner and me, with some help from our HL7 V2 interface developers) to the project in early 2019, and they became the initial spreadsheets that were used to create the HL7 V2 to FHIR guide.
I now have the somewhat dubious attribute as having be an editor working on one of the longest running projects from inception to STU publication in HL7 history (7 years). Yes, I am certain some have run longer, but none that I can think of off the top of my head. Part of my editorial role in the early days was to have evolved the effort to represent the content in spreadsheets, and then to translate (in code), those nearly 400 spreadsheets into over 250 FHIR ConceptMap resources. More recently, it has been maintenance of the V2 to FHIR IG generator code base, and detailed technical review of the content produced in the guide to verify that it can be accessed in computable form, not just via spreadsheets but through the FHIR Resources, and ensuring that all content is consistently handled and can be used to automatically generate a V2 to FHIR converter.
I'm thrilled to see this finally published, and our team has been working on turning the output of this guide into a Data Modernization offering for public health that will enable them to turn legacy data into FHIR resources that can be accessed through modern APIs. We are working on a completely new software base to support V2 and CDA to FHIR conversions we'll be talking more about at HIMSS 26.
